What's In Your Mind?

I can feel the trailhead is near

The dialogue started with my friend Sasha continues: I ask him questions about his path. He tells me that the path he is following (the Buddhist path) is 3-fold: the goal: "a state of permanent joy in experiencing the world the way it is", the way: "skillful meditations and other methods that allow us to reach the goal", the structure: "the whole body of teachings, vast and profound". He says: "believe me, life is getting happier and more joyful with each passing day - even when I refuse to believe it." He says that I might want to check out the Diamond Way Buddhist Center in San Francisco.

Hmm... the "spiritual path"... It sounds appealing, but what does it really mean for me? I can hardly picture myself meditating every day... How long will it take to get there, even if I start practicing meditation now? 7 years, 12 years? What he says is exciting, but the task of "spiritual growth" seems daunting, somehow reserved to an elite of people with out-of-this-world strong will power...

Also, I feel that I cannot wait that long! My restlessness is reaching an all-time high, and I decide to throw all my pressing existential questions on a carefully crafted email that I send him, hoping to get an answer:

"Tell me what really matters to you
Tell me what you consider important
Tell me if there is a goal besides experiencing the joy in experiencing the world the way it is - or if this IS the goal
Tell me if there is an "evolutionary" goal (bringing the Universe to some place it IS NOT yet - did you catch a glimpse of where?) and if you know what the role of Humanity in this evolutionary goal is - and what your role is
Tell me if I should look for my role in this goal (looks like your answer might be no there isn't any, or it is not our prerogative to take any role in this)
Then tell me what use you (will) do of the energy of the Universe that you are generating/holding
Tell me what the humanistic perspective of the teachings is
Tell me what the infinite potential you are talking about is
And how does it unfold through you?
And how does it unfold through me?
And how does it unfold through Humanity?

I quite agree that difficulties, confusion, mal de vivre etc are an energy booster, that they are my friends, and I welcome them as such (see, it makes me reach out and push doors open!). I accept it all, I accept all that has befallen to me since I was born - my family, my experiences, my health, my finiteness, my petty achievements, etc. I see I am a tiny part of the big Whole, and that you are me and I am you because there is only one thing.

I want to know what to DO with all this, all this endowment + past path of mine, what the piece of the Universe that I am is supposed to bring back to the Whole. I suppose with peace of mind and more rigorous learning I will find out. I was curious to know if you have. I will be restless until I do. It is very GOOD to hear about your path.

Thank you so much for sharing with me. I am looking forward to following the joyful path of learning and finding things out!

I will first read Lama Ole’s book and then go to the Diamond Way center in San Francisco. I am also starting to explore yoga more seriously (encountered Sivananda yoga, a quite "holistic" school of yoga, if you've heard of it, at the very least the breathing and asanas are doing wonders with my marathon training!)

At least I am on the move again, I can feel the trailhead is near...!"

Coming out

Well, I guess seeking professional help has borne fruits… After just a few minutes of sitting with my counselor Roslyn, I knew that my "depression" was already a thing of the past. My two first sessions with her have had an incredible impact on me, made me feel amazing, in charge, etc. I cannot believe that I haven’t gone earlier, and that I have never sought help before!

Tonight, I went to see her for the third time (I am leaving tomorrow morning for a 10-day trip to Guatemala). I told her that, this time, I would like to talk, not about Richard, but about me, what I am going to do with my life, etc. I’ve been having the distinct feeling that my depression over Richard was the tree hiding the forest – that the real issue was not my relationship with him, but my relationship with myself. 

So I start talking about myself, what I would like to do with my life, etc… And I realize it is actually the first time I ever do so! So, for the first time ever in my life, I hear myself say who I am, I hear myself say "I want to be a spiritual teacher or something like that, help people get on with life". Me, a spiritual teacher! Waoh. This is quite a shock. For the first time tonight I feel I know who I really am.

She tells me: "You do what you can until you know your destiny" (from the movie The Last Samurai that she just saw).

I am in an incredible state of clarity and bliss after that session with Roslyn, something akin to a mild mystical state... I share my feelings with Richard in an email (as I am still hooked to writing to him ;-)):

"I just spent 75 sublime minutes with Roslyn. I think those are the best-spent $150 in my life ;-). I feel like sharing this with you, if this is OK…

To summarize, CLARITY! I realize that my attraction to "the spiritual life" is legitimate, real, powerful: it is in fact my passion. For the first time in my life, I have discovered my passion! Something that pulls me, attracts me, leads me… I must stop resisting, this is me!

It is NORMAL that I don’t work too much at work, that I have never liked my jobs too much, that I don’t feel like looking for another one. It is also normal for example that I don’t really feel like going to Guatemala and that I did not prepare for that trip (brush up my Spanish etc): I have a passion and it has been consuming all my time and energy! (…) Tonight, at last, I am starting to face it and accept it.

I feel very unstable at this time because this is like entering a new world, everything is new here, I have no reference. NEVER in my life has anyone told me about spirituality. I have been told about studying, career, enterprise, science, love, family, politics, art, etc… but NOT about spirituality (even though I was in a Catholic school all my life!). My mother was angry at me one day when she saw that I was reading a book about life after life – she said that one should not read such things. That world [the spiritual world] exists, it is now revealing itself to me day after day, but I was until now alien to it. I must therefore confront doubts, etc, it is a little bit like a yo-yo, it is difficult. But I know that these doubts will fade away then disappear, and that I will establish myself in that "new world" – I feel called to it as if by an incredible force. Tonight for the first time I accept this, I stop resisting, I stop telling myself that I am crazy, etc. This is it…

I can now see a way forward, I was able to discuss with Roslyn about where we go from here, what steps to make, etc. I am new in that world but many people (like her and like – surprise surprise – more and more people I meet) are there also… I must build more landmarks and stop doubting. She gave me a bunch of leads: seminars, groups, books, etc.

I am passionate, Richard. This felt like a disease until now, like something shameful, now I can see clearly… I finally accept who I am, what I want, where I’m going. This is huge. I know why I live in San Francisco, (...) I know why you had me read The Celestine Prophecy (after all, this is what started this whole thing, what woke up the sleeping beast! Thank you Richard!) (…)

I now feel that my life is going to change. (…) It is like a major coming out (…). It is no more a shameful disease. It is me, simply.

(…) In a way I wish I was not going to Guatemala, because this is off-track, really, although she told me to just try and look for spirituality there! All this is so new I don't even know where to look for spirituality! This is incredible. I wish I could just sit and meditate and get organized for my new life..."

Where have I brought comfort, where have I brought pain?

Following my first Tonglen meditation, I ask myself: "What are the things I’ve done in my life where I have hurt people, and what are the things I’ve done in my life where I have comforted, or helped people?"

I also decide to ask the very same question to my close family and friends (if only to check if I have a clue about what I do right and what I do wrong!): "In your experience, what are the things that I have said or done that have hurt you, and, conversely, what are the things I have said or done that have comforted, or helped you?" If I don’t know this, I am blind, I cannot move anywhere forward.

And indeed, and this is one of the big insights here, I feel I have lived my life like I was blind until now, walking in the dark, with no idea of how my actions and words have hurt people – or made them bigger and better. I want to start understanding what my "karma" (action in the world) looks like… This idea sounds super simple (like, d'huh, why haven't I ever inquired about this before) – yet how many people really know when they cause pain from when they do good? How many of us really care to discriminate? We are blind. We move in life with our eyes closed. My purpose is to understand how I can best serve the world, what my best loving skills are, and where I need to do some progress. It is like a professional 360 review, but about loving and relating to the universe.

I am surprised at my own answers to the questions: basically I have brought pain mostly through writing/talking (which I would have listed among my "strengths" otherwise), while I have brought comfort mostly through shutting up!! ;-) Here they are:

Where have I brought pain?

• Talking too much
• Writing letters
• Being stingy / counting money
• Not being humble
• Being too happy sometimes (!)
• No tact, not taking into consideration other people’s feelings
• Not being mindfully loving
• Not acting from love
• Not loving (e.g. the guy I’m with)
• Not hearing / listening
• Complaining about things, being negative
• Being angry, frustrated.

Where have I brought comfort?

• Dancing (!), i.e. being inviting, endearing, joyful
• Being tender, loving (e.g. with the guy I’m with)
• Asking questions vs. telling things, giving others the space to talk, be interested in them, open
• Asking for help and advice
• Being energetic, positive, in a giggly mood, light, funny
• Encouraging people’s intuitions, helping them formulate them
• A few times with writing letters
• Having a big smile
• Being hospitable.

Please forgive me

This Tonglen practice seems to have triggered a complete turn-around in my attitude vis-à-vis my ex Richard. I realize that I am the problem, not him (or let’s say, that my problem – i.e. where I can do the work – is myself, not him). For the first time in the five months that have elapsed since we broke up, I am able to ask him to forgive me. I understand that it is not all about him having to fix himself – that it is also about me having hurt him while we were together and me having been completely oblivious to that. When he left me, his last words were: "One can not discuss with you". Ouch. Letter to him:

"I ask you to forgive me for not understanding, while we were together, that my "communication style" – a bit aggressive, a bit arrogant, a bit pedantic – has hurt you, at times, and that it finally pushed you away from me.

Never was it my intention to hurt you nor to push you away, ever. I had not realized that I was bruising our relationship. I loved you and wanted our relationship to work out. I was working on it, but poorly. I didn’t know how to do, I was in the fog. All I wanted is to learn, but I didn’t know how or from whom. I would have liked someone (a mentor, a gimini cricket, you, a counselor, you name it) to tell me: "talk rather like this" or "talk rather like that". (…)

I was not always (or actually, not even often) "mindful" with you – for this is what we are talking about here. This is what clarity is: understanding at all times the ramifications of everything one says or does. Staying in the awareness of what is precious in our lives, and preserve it, cherish it.

I’m working on it. On being mindful. Of my actions and my words. I hope that it won’t take a lifetime. But no, I think I’m making progress. It’s hard to believe, but I really don’t approach life the same way I used to.

I would like you to forgive me for this – for my lacks of "mindfulness" in our interactions – I would like you to give me closure on that, also, if you so desire, of course. (…) Thank you."

Forgive you for what?

Richard replied to my "please forgive me" email, asking "forgive you for what?" I guess I was not clear enough. And I must not assume that he realizes how much things are changing inside of me! I make things more explicit:

"Richard, this email was quite important, actually.

I am telling you, Richard, that I have understood at last what you came to teach me (or, let’s say, one of the things you came to teach me!). You came to tell me "One can not discuss with you".

I am telling you that I have become aware of the fact that, indeed, one can not discuss with me. Or let’s say one could not before I understood that, indeed, I was not very "mindful" in my conversations with other people: I was like a babbling child, I was not aware of the energy (at times aggressive, arrogant, what have you) that I was diffusing in my conversations, I was not aware of the consequences of my "communication style", I was not aware that I was sometimes giving the impression that I was trying to crush the person I was talking to, I was not listening to the signs of discomfort around me. I couldn’t see anything, I didn’t understand anything, I was perfectly oblivious to the problem. As a result, I was able to have rich and pleasant conversations only with people like me, while I made many others run way. Even people who were the closest to me. Like yourself.

I am telling you that I have now understood this lesson that you came to give me. The lesson is painful given that it cost me our separation – I can assure you that it is all the better learnt. I can see all this quite clearly now (I didn’t back then).

That I can see it does not mean that I am now perfect on this account ;-), but, as a good first step, I am aware now, I am becoming increasingly mindful of it, and, little by little, I am correcting, subtly changing the way I interact. When I am in a conversation now, I see what’s going on, where before I didn’t see a thing. I choose my words. I understand their impact. I see the exchange from new angles. I talk less. I am more skillful. I speak only when it is necessary. I am learning, it is fascinating! I feel like I’m being born again (this is only one aspect of this rebirth – light is coming out a little bit everywhere, actually).

Doesn’t it make you happy, that I understand at last what you came to teach me? :-)

So I’m asking you again, Richard, because it is important for me, to go on with life, even if you don’t understand: do you forgive my lacks of "mindfulness" in our interactions? I know it hurt you when we were together, because you shared that with me, so I’m asking you if you’d like to forgive me for that. It’s important for me. 

Why is it important? Because when you start seeing the suffering that you may have caused in your life from your own ignorance, you feel it too, and it hurts, and you want to suppress it.

Thanks again."

Negativity still floating in my consciousness

In Paris for a few days’ visit, I wake up on a slightly disturbing dream that I can’t remember – except I know it was manifesting some micro-fears I have… Email to my Love:

"The key thing I am learning here is this – there is some negative material (fear, etc) still floating in my consciousness – subconscious – whatever.

This is where the work is for me, this is why I am making these new life choices: work on myself to fully eradicate any left-over of negativity in me. Do the spiritual work it takes. Because I can see how anything passing through my consciousness is creative. Clean your consciousness, clean the universe. I can see that there is only one thing and that when you develop spiritually you tap into more and more of it, it's like your consciousness gets enlarged and goes more and more beyond the personal, and this is why attentive, rigorous spiritual work is required, to keep the ever-widening garden tidy, clean and beautiful."

Memories of the past

Today I’m visiting the house where I grew up in France, and sorting through my old stuff, looking at the things that made my life then, reading my journals, etc. I write:

"I have been plunging today into memories of the past, e.g. taking a fresh look my ambiguous relationship with religion -- I knew that there was "something there", but a lot of the stuff was bothering me, and there was nowhere else to turn for spiritual life at the time than my Catholic cultural background -- what a trip. For example, I wrote an account of the mystical experience I had when I was 13 (without knowing then what it was), of my realization that "to live is to see God in everything" (i.e. that our inner mental disposition determines our outer life). Quite profound, huh... Guess I didn't quite apply the insight in the troubled years (teenage) that followed.

I read journals I wrote, and see all the confusion and the difficulty I had to understand what life was about, what love was about, I see the pain, the despair at times, the lack of tools. The struggle with negative emotions (jealousy, incapacity to love, insecurity, etc), with understanding what this is all about, the tension between the material life that was proposed to me and a more spiritual life unfortunately obscured by the errors of religion, which discouraged me in the end. Seeing the early years of my life in this light brings in me much love and compassion for the countless beings who now suffer like I suffered in my heart through teenage. May they also find a path to... "salvation", freedom, love. Incredible how these words from the Christian traditions now make sense to me.

Comes to my memory what I was filling my days with at the time, the quiet desperation at time, the empty days spent playing cards on my own or watching TV for hours on end, the vague intuition that love was everything (the word love fills my journals), while not being able to express it with my parents, seeking timidly to express it with my friends, I remember reading tons of books (guess this is what "saved" me), I remember enduring things that I didn't like without ever deploying energy to change anything (feeling incapacitated at times by my parents' authority), I remember all these hours, days, months, years of my life. Waoh..."

What to do when you don't know what to do

As I was writing this retro-post yesterday, I re-read some of Eva Pierrakos’ "lectures".

In one of them (can’t remember which one!), I found the following "practice" that I applied right away to some apparently unsolvable dilemma I had been carrying along for the last few days – and it brought me out of this foggy patch. Here’s the practice:

Whenever you are confused about a situation, you need to meditate on the three levels of reality:

1. What you think is happening (clarify your own feelings)
2. What it really happening (change perspective, etc)
3. What could happen (the myriad possibilities).

This is how I meditated last night. On 1, 2, and 3. The light came right away, the fog lifted completely. It took me about 15 minutes just lying on my bed and focusing intensely on the issue using this framework – not with my mind, but with my whole self.

Integral practice

Inspired by this Kosmic blogger, I have sketched out what my "Integral Practice", using the framework from Ken Wilber's One taste, P. 121-123, looks like.

Upper-Right quadrant (Individual, Objective, Behavioral)

Physical
- diet: with occasional exceptions, no meat, no alcohol, no coffee, no sugar, no white starch, lots of vegetables, eating light, eating at home (my diet naturally changed as I awoke spiritually: there were no "no this, no that" before).
- structural: yoga/running/swimming (total of 5 times a week), occasional hiking/mountaineering or mountainbiking on week-ends

Neurological
- pharmacological: no medication (consciously try to avoid them as much as possible)
- brain/mind machines: have not tried! Sounds wild!

Upper-Left quadrant (Individual, Subjective, Intentional)

Emotional
- breath: yoga (see above), relaxation (in combination with meditation)
- sex: mindful "whole-bodied" sex as much as possible! :-)

Mental
- therapy: not at the moment, but it took a big role in my awakening. Will consider going once a year or so for a few sessions.
- journaling: yes, the best tool for self-observation! It was a big part of my awakening too.
- lots of reading/researching spiritual literature
- vision (visualization, affirmation, conscious living): yes, as part of journaling and meditation. Conscious living has become the default state, I can't really "hide" anymore!

Spiritual (here I am not sure yet where my meditations fit in the 4 categories, but I practice different types of meditation to be sure ;-). I meditate an average of 1x30mn a day (I try 2x30mn a day) + meditation retreats now and then)
- psychic: contemplate nature whenever I can! (especially sunrises and sunsets, and the moon...)
- subtle: tonglen, mantra meditation (not sure they fit there)
- causal: vipassana (witnessing meditation)
- non-dual: guru yoga meditation from Diamond Way buddhism (I think this meditation actually covers all four types)

Lower-Right quadrant (Social, Interobjective)

Systems (exercising responsibility to earth, nature, biosphere, and geopolitical infrastructures at all levels)
- I am mindful of my impact on the planet: car usage, water, electricity, packaging, etc.
- I educate others as much as I can on global warming and other environmental issues.

Institutional (exercising educational, political, and civic duties to family, town, state, nation, world)
- I keep informed on what's going on in the world, I educate others whenever I get a chance!

Lower-Left quadrant (Cultural, Intersubjective)

Relationships (with family, friends, sentient beings in general, decentering the self, making relationships part of one's growth)
- Making relationships part of my growth has been one of the main realizations and focus of my spiritual growth.
- Especially, I work hard on creating a deep, beautiful relationship with my boyfriend!
- In general, I try to bring something to everyone I encounter: family, friends, anyone I interact with.

Community service (volunteer work, homeless shelters, hospice, etc.)
- I volunteer at the MIT club of Northern California, Renewable Energy program.
- Writing this blog? (not sure if/where it fits, there are Upper-Left and Lower-Right components also, so I put it in the middle ;-))

Morals (engaging the intersubjective world of the Good, practising compassion in relation to all sentient beings)
- Not sure what it means, but I guess I do that now... maybe Tonglen meditation actually fits here? (it opens the heart).
- I now relate to other beings' pains much more now and it seems much easier to "do Good" as it was pre-awakening, as I see more clearly what's going on.

Who am I?

At the coaching roundtable I attended a few days ago, and where I decided to become an integral life coach, we were offered to answer a few questions about ourselves as an introspection exercise. The first question was: "Who are you?"

My answer (I guess, in the full mystical tradition!):

"I am That
I am That Which Is
I am
I am I-Am-ness
I am consciousness manifesting in this precious human form."

Indeed... what else? ;-)